Judd vs. The MSNBC Volcano

01.28.10

Senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H) – who was mentioned in last night’s State of the Union by President Barack Obama as a co-sponsor of the Bipartisan Task Force for Responsible Fiscal Action Act of 2009 – got into it with MSNBC hosts Contessa Brewer and Melissa Francis tonight. You can see the clip below of what set him off:

This is not good reporting. It’s these types of shows that lend evidence to the notion of a liberal-controlled MSM; this show is clearly slanted. Not that it’s some rarity – MSNBC and Fox News each have their own plethora of shows that pander to their respective audiences. Francis’s only reason for throwing out the cutting education bit was to inflame the situation, get some juicy soundbites perhaps (check!), and try to peg the Republicans as being so caught up in their ideology against spending as to not even want to invest in education, which is wrong – not even Republicans are calling for education cuts (except in Michigan, where the situation is so dire that even Democratic Governor Granholm is cutting state funding for schools).

Insinuating that Gregg and the Republicans want to cut education gets us nowhere. It was a conversation ender. Gregg goes into how he would cut funding of TARP and the stimulus bill. Perhaps they could’ve asked him how that would affect the extremely fragile nature of the economy. Or ask where the Republicans were on fiscal responsibility the past eight years when the GOP’s spending was out of control, leading us to our current massive deficit and subsequent recession. Plenty of directions to go. Accusing him of cutting education wasn’t one of them.

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8 comments

It’s a moot point really.

The Leftist enemies of America who actually listen to MSNBC only see a Republican to attack. And for Americans, who lend no credence to filth like those on MSNBC, it’s something on MSNBC and therefor nothing but treasonous, anti-American propaganda.

First: nothing good comes of describing liberals as “creatures” and everyone else as Americans. It’s beyond polarizing: it’s just wrong and dumb. If you want to call Olbermann a creature, fine. That doesn’t really bother me. But to lump a huge group of Americans into the category of sub-human, you really are just playing into the us-vs-them, red-vs-blue separation that does nothing but divide and anger instead of actually dealing with or solving any problems.

On to the substance of your comment: I disagree with you that it’s a moot point. I think it’s a good thing to challenge our media. Its role has devolved into a pathetic group of people either blatantly on the GOP side or blatantly on the Democratic side, neither of which have any real interest in facts or truly providing a check on the government. They exist only for their ratings.

I just now realized that perhaps you were using the term “creatures” to describe newspersons in the MSM across the board. I suppose that would be a little less blasphemous but equally as pointless of a comment. We should expect more from our news. We should demand it. And we shouldn’t be lenient to bad reporting even if we happen to agree with their content. That goes for both sides of the divide.

I was talking about the Leftist Media animals. The bulk of the Leftists are still human, if enemies of America.

As for that media, they’ve given Americans no reason to expect better from them. Expectations and demands are two quite different things.

“News” is no longer a cost center for networks; it’s a profit & loss center. Deciding that their drivel is moot and pointless – and not bothering to watch or listen to it is being anything but lenient.

It’s demanding that they change in the manner that actually works, by hurting their ratings and and advertising revenue streams.

And you might want to get off the Dem v GOP idea. I’m far more of a Conservative than I am a Republican, since the GOP largely moved away from Conservative principles and I know some Dems who DO meet many of those Conservative ideals.

That would be an effective manner of hurting the media if there were a true alternative. The blogosphere and the Internet in general as a media outlet has definitely gained a lot of traction lately but the masses still tune into the nightly news, CNN, and Fox News for their updates. I don’t tune into any of those shows myself but I do catch some clips of it online occasionally when other sources point to them so I suppose I am following your model of hoping to change the system: ignoring the crap. I just don’t know if it’s the best course of action on its own. We both write about news items and current events in our blogs so we do more than the average person who is fed up with the media outlets. I guess we can just keep doing what we’re doing and hope that things shift. However, the blogosphere doesn’t replace media; in fact, it probably props up the media as opinion trend rather than fights against it. At least we don’t write under the guise of being true journalism as they do. And too many people still don’t realize that the MSM holds very little news value anymore so I think that’s why we need to keep pushing awareness of the biases and just lack of journalistic integrity from those outlets.

I have gleaned that you’re more of a conservative than Republican. I was only posing that conflict in terms of the fact that your comments and posts do tend to argue hard one way or the other lines rather than middle grounds, compromises, or tempered reactions. Regardless of your political leanings, you do tend to lean toward extremes and absolutes and I do think that can be unproductive and promulgates the win or lose atmosphere that is currently stymying legislation.

See, I think the issue is that you’re looking at the final health care bill as being the starting point of discussion, when in fact they’ve been discussed, changed, and tweaked as legislators negotiated and compromised. If it were this extremely liberal, anti-American bill as you say it is, then it seems that it should be an extremely progressive plan with universal coverage for all, government-run health care, and not even an attempt at cost controls. It’s not. Not even close, really. Just because it’s a giant bill doesn’t mean that it’s automatically awful. Plenty of items have been changed since the original committees presented their bills in each chamber of Congress. And while Republicans offered no alternatives – only that they blatantly refused the public option and rallied the public against it with the cries of socialism – the compromises ended up being within the Democratic Party alone. Again – I don’t think the HCR is perfect by any means, but to say that there’s no room for compromise and never has been because the Democrats purposefully crafted the bill that way is just false. If you were being truthful about the issue of wanting compromise, you would be placing at least some blame on the Republicans – but you’re not. Instead you use words like “poisoned” and you throw words like “compromised” between quotes where none are needed.

As for defense – it’s become utterly taboo to even mention cutting any defense spending, but until we accept the fact that even defense isn’t exempt from cost controls, our deficit will continue to struggle to maintain balance.

Any compromise, in the sense of getting only part of one wants must be secondary to getting something actively destructive (e.g. insurance mandates). That is the what I meant by poisoned.

And don’t bother trying to paint the GOP as the party of “No.” They were, to a very large extent, cut out of committees by the Left. They had plans and ideas, but those weren’t allowed to be even discussed.

You’re also misunderstanding my point about the bill being crafted in such a way as to make compromising upon its specific harmful.

I’m not actually saying that was crafted so as to prevent it from being modified. I’m saying that the various clauses in it are counterbalancing and inter-related and that cutting them apart would be harmful.

Take, for example, the loss of the Public Option. They removed it, but they didn’t remove the punitive regulations upon the insurance providers. That IS going to cause those companies to raise their premiums and is going to put no market pressure on them to not raise them higher than is necessary.

I don’t think we’re failing to communicate – it’s just a complex conversation so it might take some back and forths to figure it out.

I am not saying that every single member of the GOP should be agreeing with this bill and helping it become a law when there are parts of it that they truly believe are bad for America. That would be ridiculous.

But the issue is that the GOP is the Party of No right now. The Democrats were going to comprise a strong majority of those actually writing these bills: they’re the majority party, the ones elected to do this. Just because they weren’t the ones directly writing the bill – their influence was indeed felt by the Democrats desire to gain GOP support (no universal coverage, dropping the public option, allowing people to purchase coverage across state lines, etc.) but the GOP decided to unilaterally oppose the bill regardless of what was in it. The problem is that the GOP feels that unless they come up with an idea, it’s not worthy of their support, even if it’s something that they would get behind if one of their own had written it. Case in point: the huge tax cuts that were in the stimulus bill that zero Republicans voted for – yet, of course now, Tim Pawlenty says that we need tax cuts to help balance the budget. Sure, it’s a great idea when the GOP has it, but if the Democrats do it, it’s socialism. This is why I call them the Party of No.

I don’t know enough about economics to know about what aspects removed will raise premiums or not. I know that when you are reforming a system like this, it takes a ton of different steps and removing one could render another pointless or harmful. Again, I don’t think that the Senate Bill is perfect, but it’s a great start and will be honed along the way with further reform. It has to be done because the way the status quo is right now – which is what the GOP is offering as an alternative – will for sure cause premiums to rise (they’re already rising exponentially compared to wages over the past decade) at an even higher rate than if the HCR were passed.